The Tea Party movement continues to baffle the self-styled political experts who dominate media coverage. Candidates once written off as cranks with no chance of winning triumphed in Tuesday's primaries. In particular, the success of principled candidates in Delaware and New York will force establishment types to face an inconvenient Obama-era truth. Liberal ideology has failed, and the public knows it.
President Obama on Wednesday clobbered Republicans for holding "hostage" tax cuts for 98 percent of Americans just hours after a top House Democrat, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, signaled a willingness to compromise on an issue that has become the ultimate political football ahead of November's elections.
Whatever the fate of the slate of "tea party" candidates running in November, conservatives say this year's primary season already has changed the Republican Party for the better.
As the electoral fog lifted after this week's primaries, the Republican Party on Wednesday began the awkward task of reaching out to "tea party"-backed winners they previously shunned.
The rogues at the heart of two embarrassing years of corruption accusations, partisan gridlock and dirty politics in the New York state Senate were forcefully ejected by voters Tuesday, leaving in tatters the web of political alliances that had long insulated the two Democrats.
White House sends spending wish list
Republicans were quick to dismiss the Senate majority leader's plan to grant citizenship to some illegal immigrants who came to the United States when they were children as a political ploy aimed at wooing voters and pro-illegal-immigrant groups before the November election.
The primary process exists in American politics as a mechanism in which members of a party can hold its incumbents accountable, as well as allow voters to determine the candidate they feel best fits their views, goals and mood in a general election. Both parties support this process rhetorically, cheering on a good debate and then demanding unity behind the winner at the end - which has traditionally been either an incumbent or a favorite of the party establishment.
President Obama sent another reminder on Monday about the importance of this fall's Senate races by resubmitting five judicial nominations so extreme as to be alien to the American experience.
